Here, the distinction I make is between language able to denote the objective truth and language rooted more or less in personal opinion.
If a doctor is performing an abortion there may be different words used to describe the operation as a medical procedure. But then it is only a matter of learning the sounds invented in different parts of the world to encompass the words used in order to communicate coherently with the pregnant woman or with other doctors.
But the medical procedure itself transcends gender or race or ethnicity or sexual preference or religious convictions or political values.
It is only when we shift gears and the language used focuses instead on the morality of abortion, that objectivity [eventually] gives why to the subjective/subjunctive parameters of value judgments.
And it is here that we bump into the manner in which I construe dasein and conflicting goods.
There is no such thing as a right language and a wrong language. But it is my language. In my land, I enforce it.
It is the preservation of a cultural value in it’s own land. The foreigner can call that an agenda and choose to fight it. He will be met with resistance.How does that sound?
I would only suggest that, again, with respect to those relationships that language can in fact denote objectively [the laws of math and science, empirical fact, the logical rules of language etc], there is a right word and a wrong word. But with respect to identity and value judgments, right and wrong can always be rationalized by making certain assumptions about what is true or false.
Thus there are folks who insist that abortion is immoral because it results in the killing of innocent human life. Meanwhile there are other folks who insist that abortion is moral because otherwise women will be forced to give birth against their will. And that is immoral.
Thus conflicting goods. Both sides have arguments that the other side is unable to make go away. But we can’t live in a world where both sides prevail.
The same is true with all other moral conflicts that make the headlines day after day after day.
Even extreme behavior like rape can be rationalized. If one starts from the premise that, morally, personal gratification is the center of the universe [in a world sans God] anything can be justified if one is willing to accept the consequences of living with those who will punish such behavior. And then with God, all bets are off, right? What monstrosity has not been rationalized through religion? Or, for the secularists, through ideology [Reason].
Why must all rational men behave the same? Is there ever only one solution to a problem?
What is crucial though is that behaviors must be fitted into one or another legal and political contraption. And here that can revolve around either God or ideology or democracy. What’s important to me is in recognizing that if there be no deontological agenda open to us, the only recourse is moderation, negotiation and compromise. But that will always be fluid and unstable and problematic.
But at least most folks are able to make their own existential leap to a frame of mind they deem the most rational/moral. Instead, I’m rather hopelessly entangled in this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
They can either take what they want and rationalize it in terms of a world where the strong prevail over the weak, or they can try to justify what they do by constructing an intellectual contraption like Satyr’s. In other words, he feels compelled to justify his behaviors as more than just the brute facticity of might makes right. Instead, what he rationalizes must be seen as the noble and virtuous thing to do. Only he hardly ever brings this down to earth such that the discussion revolves around actual conflicting human behaviors that we are all familiar with. Instead, it’s always ascribed in the lofty [and didactic] rhetoric of The Intellectual.
Or, being less kind, The Pedant.
I see what you mean, but why do you think think that there is anything particularly wrong with justifying one’s behaviors through reasoning, even if ultimately you are doing something simply because you want to?
With Satyr, I find that the problem is that at times what he says doesn’t match his behaviors, but I won’t speak in detail about that. That would be very indelicate.
My point is that the scholastic/didactic “reasoning” that folks like Satyr and Lyssa employ revolves largely around the definitions that they give to words such that the meaning of the words used in their [largely] abstract arguments is necessarily true because it is predicated on the internal logic derived from the definition/meaning they give to the words.
And, in fact, it is when you take that circular logic down here and plug it into actual moral and political conflicts that you begin to ascertain the limitations of their serial assertions.
Almost all of the objectivists focus the beam on these clouds of abstraction over there.
And, with Satyr and Lyssa and Magnum, I have asked them repeatedly to give us examples of how they actually do walk the talk in their interactions with others. But that necessarily does involve bringing their theoretical jargon down to earth and [so far] they won’t go there.